Five Big Movie Songs from 1957

Here's another one of those EPs that collate the current hits into one hopefully irresistible package. This one comes from the Columbia folks, who in 1957 had strong (or at least reasonably successful) songs from four notable films.

But wait - the headline above says five movie songs, not four. That's because the hit from the film Love in the Afternoon wasn't the theme but an ancient waltz called "Fascination" that was used on the soundtrack. So I've added that tune to the package - in three version, two from the hit record and one from the soundtrack EP.

But back to the Columbia EP. Their set starts off with the label's big hope from August of 1957 - the title song from An Affair to Remember. It was entrusted to the golden pipes of Vic Damone, who the year before had celebrated his new contract with the label by turning My Fair Lady's "On the Street Where You Live" into a big chart hit.

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"An Affair to Remember" has the soaring quality that Vic (and Percy Faith) did so well, and the record is a winner, although not as memorable as his famed rendition of the My Fair Lady anthem. The Affair music is by the veteran Harry Warren with lyrics by Harold Adamson and Leo McCarey, the film's director. In the film, Vic's singing is heard over the opening credits.

We move from Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's affair to the Old West - Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral. This legendary tale brought forth a typically robust ballad from the master Dimitri Tiomkin (see the celebration of his music here), working with the great lyricist Ned Washington.

Who else but Frankie Laine could supply the vocal? He is fantastic, but as I wrote a while back, "Laine's inimitable singing was a popular success, although the record did not become as iconic as High Noon."

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The next song is a decided contrast - for A Face in the Crowd, director Elia Kazan used folk singer Tom Glazer to provide the music, with lyrics from screenwriter Budd Schulberg. I don't believe the Hi-Lo's single of the title song was a hit, but it is nonetheless a good record.

The group had just moved to Columbia and was enjoying increasing success with its records. The vocal arrangements of Gene Puerling became highly influential, and the penetrating tenor voice of Clark Burroughs was a distinguishing feature of their sound.

The EP's fourth song is sung by the young Jerry Vale, who already had been at Columbia for several years by the time he was tasked with Love in the Afternoon's title song. The film features 56-year-old Gary Cooper romancing 28-year-old Audrey Hepburn. This had to take place in the afternoon so it wouldn't interfere with Coop's early bedtime.

The film had a title song by Matty Malneck, with Johnny Mercer lyrics, which Vale handled well on the single release. The biggest hit from the film, however, was written in 1904. More about that below.

LINK to the Columbia EP

Music from Love in the Afternoon

In Love in the Afternoon, Coop is followed everywhere by a band of gypsies (not the Hendrix band, although that would have been interesting). This troupe provides the soundtrack.

Perhaps realizing that it would have limited appeal, the Verve label put the music out on an EP, and a short one at that. Its three songs are "Love in the Afternoon," "Hot Paprika" and "Fascination." The latter was the hit from the score, written way back when by Fermo Dante Marchetti. ("Hot Paprika," like the title music, is by Malneck.)

"Fascination" caught the public's fancy, and the biggest hit was by vocalist Jane Morgan, singing new lyrics by Dick Manning.

The gypsies perhaps being otherwise occupied, Morgan's record company, Kapp, brought in a group called the Troubadors as backing. The resulting single has Jane's vocal on one side and the Troubadors whistling on the other.

Kapp presented this to the public complete with the picture sleeve below showing Coop in ascot and Hepburn in pigtails - "old chic and young chick," as I remarked when I first posted this nearly 17 years ago. 

All recordings are remastered in ambient stereo.

LINK to Love in the Afternoon EP and Fascination single

Moiseiwitsch Plays Medtner

Benno Moiseiwitsch

The pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963) has appeared here before in Liszt's Hungarian Fantasia, and on my other blog in Delius' Piano Concerto.

Today we have him in music from his native land, Russia - two brief Skaski (Fairy Tales) from the total of 38 composed by Nikolai Medtner (1879-1951).

Medtner was a protege of Sergei Taneyev, and a friend of Sergei Rachmaninoff. Even so, his music has never become a mainstream taste, although his piano concertos are recorded from time to time. (The first recording of those concertos, with the composer as soloist, was underwritten by a maharaja in the 1940s.)

Moiseiwitsch was an early advocate of Medtner - the first recording in this set dates from 1928, with the second from 1944. The pianist's great technique is well allied to the vein of fantasy that Medtner indulges in his Skaski. The effect is enchanting.

Nikolai Medtner

A 1944 review in The Gramophone was, however, not convinced: "The Fairy Tale ... sounds like a rather fantastic march: it is not, I think, one of the best of his [Medtner's] many pieces in this form, but I have a feeling it might grow on one. The performance is, again, excellent."

LINK

Today's (Make That 1955's) Hits with Charlie Spivak

Trumpeter Charlie Spivak was a long-time RCA Victor artist, but tastes had changed in 1955 from the heyday of the big bands, so he was assigned to record cover songs for RCA's budget Camden label.

Charlie's presence does work on this EP, however, which consists entirely of mainstream songs - no R&B or R&R.

Camden churned out a variety of such sets at the time, several from 1955. These were issued both as EPs, as here, and in the LP format. The idea was to combat the budget labels that were cranking out cover records day and night. On this blog, we recently heard from Camden's Snooky Lanson; there also were older entries by Bob Carroll and Gisele MacKenzie. The main blog has played host to Stuart Foster and various artists.

The secondary ensemble on Spivak's record was the Honey Dreamers, a vocal group who were promoted to headliners in 1956 for another of these Today's Hits releases, which recently appeared here. Like Spivak, they came up in the 1940s and represented an vocal tradition that was being supplanted in the mid-1950s. At about the same time, the group made a very good Gershwin LP that has appeared on my other blog.

The Honey Dreamers: Bob Davis, Nan Green, Marion Bye, Bob Mitchell and Jerry Packer

Also on the Spivak date is a vocalist named Audrey Morris. Oddly, there was a singer of that name under contract to RCA's "X" label at the same time, but the aural evidence is that this is not her. In fact, I have no information on this other Audrey Morris.

Spivak's trumpet is heard throughout the EP. He was never a jazz artist, but listening to his lovely tone is always a delight.

Here are the songs on the EP:

• "Learnin' the Blues" - A big hit for Frank Sinatra, the Vicky Silver song was written for and first recorded on a local label by Joe Valino in 1954. (I have quite a few Valino records, and have been meaning to transfer them for 15 years or so.) The Honey Dreamers handle the vocals.

• "I'll Never Stop Loving You" - Nicholas Brodsky and Sammy Cahn wrote this for Doris Day to sing in Love Me or Leave Me, where she played Ruth Etting. The Other Audrey Morris sings it well enough, although she misses the fatalistic edge that Day brought to the song.

• "A Blossom Fell" - Howard Barnes, Harold Cornelius, and Dominic John wrote this clunky song of betrayal, and Nat King Cole's unique warmth and sincerity made it a hit. The Other Audrey Morris is not in his league.

• "Something's Gotta Give" - Johnny Mercer's dynamic song was written for Fred Astaire, who is incomparable singing it in Daddy Long Legs. The Honey Dreamers do it nicely, but they are once again up against a legend.

"I'll Never Stop Loving You" and "Something's Gotta Give" were nominated for an Academy Award for best song, but lost to "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" - which appeared on one of the Today's Hits EPs featuring Bob Carroll.

As for the Real Audrey Morris, she was a very good singer who made two LPs in the 1950s, one for "X" and one for Bethlehem. The latter is a real gem. I may prepare a post for the main blog featuring both albums.

LINK

Danny Cedrone Returns

The Esquire Boys guitarists:
Danny Cedrone and Bob Scaltrito

The influential guitarist Danny Cedrone appeared here a short while ago with recordings by his group the Esquire Boys. Now old friend LaFong has come up with three additional tracks to add to our pile. Thanks, LaFong!

The first one is an item I really should have posted with the first episode of this series. It is "Bobbysox Jamboree," which is the flip side of the Esquire Boys' Guyden version of "Rock-a-Beatin Boogie," part of that first set. It dates from 1954.

For reasons lost to time, the Boys are called "The Squires" on this side of the record. But it is identifiably the same group, which here features both of the band's guitarists - Cedrone and Bob Scaltrito. The Jamboree is a basic boogie with the guitarists trading leads throughout the record. It's very enjoyable.

The other two records feature the Cedrone Sisters, who were not Danny's sisters but rather his young daughters. They recorded two songs for the Nickelodeon label, probably in 1953.

Danny Cedrone and daughters

The sisters were an impressively well-drilled unit, singing confidently and in tune, with the close harmonies that characterize the best sister acts.

That said, they were also quite young, so their singing also had a penetrating quality that's a bit tiring to hear.

Danny (presumably) had them record a specialty called "Nickelodeon Jamboree," which is a medley of pop songs that includes an amusing take on Johnny Ray's "Cry."

The flip side is a cover of Louis Prima's 1950 jump hit "Oh Babe," an odd choice for a bunch of kids. But again, it's a chance to show off their impressive virtuosity.

Because it's a cover record, I've included a bonus of the original, which features the vocals of Prima and Keely Smith, along with Louis' trumpet and the big band R&B backing that was his specialty. It's a fun record.

Re: the photo below. For those of you who never saw the Prima act, part of their shtick was that Louis was hyperactive and Keely was stone-faced.

LINK

Louis and Keely flanked by a cover and the original of "Oh Babe"

100 Years Ago: the Giant Step of Electrical Recording

That big old horn you see at left is what musicians had to contend with in the early days of recording. Until 1925, you made a record by cozying up to the horn, which took the sounds you produced and drove a needle that scratched them (or a rude facsimile of them) onto disc. No microphones, no electronics.

The result was often dim, and worked best with a few voices or instruments. When you got the band together - as you can see in the image above from the Victor studio - the results could be cacophonous.

The horn was relatively insensitive, so orchestras resorted to using such instruments as the Stroh violin - you can see one at front, with its own horn poking out of the soundboard and pointed at the big recording horn.

Electrical recording was a leap forward - probably the biggest qualitative change ever in the recording industry. While acoustic recordings generally had a frequency response of about 300-3000 Hz, electrical recording then covered from about 50-6000 Hz, enough to dramatically improve fidelity.

To demonstrate this difference, I've prepared the same piece of music in acoustic and electrical recordings made just six years apart. For both of these, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski plays an excerpt from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade - "The Young Prince and Young Princess."

The acoustic recording, which is heavily cut and reorchestrated, comes from 1921. The sessions were arduous. Stokowski and band had devoted four dates to the piece in 1920 and 1921 without achieving an acceptable take. (This apparently was the norm rather than the exception for them.) Finally a good take (number 10) was set down on March 25, 1921.

Labels of the acoustic and electrical Scheherazade recordings

The critic Rob Cowan writes in Gramophone (I nicked this idea from him): "Listening to Stokowski’s acoustic recordings of music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, specifically ‘The Young Prince and Young Princess’ (recorded 1921), is instructive. The acoustic version ... sounds as if it’s being played by a chamber ensemble with bongos, whereas by the time the complete work was recorded in 1927, captured on wax, Stokowski’s characteristic Philadelphian opulence could be reproduced with impressive realism."

Stokowski twiddles the dials at an Academy of Music recording session

That second recording session took place in Philadelphia's Academy of Music on October 10, 1927, where the orchestra was able to record an acceptable take in two passes. The aural result is a good example of the Stokowski magic, why he was sometimes called the "old sorcerer," although he was not so old when these discs were made (38 and 45).

There's more about the transition to electrical recording in Rob Cowan's article. Also, historian Allan Sutton writes in detail about the beginnings of electrical recording here.

LINK

Danny Cedrone and the Esquire Boys

Danny Cedrone

The short-lived guitarist Danny Cedrone (1920-54) was highly influential in the rise of rock-'n'-roll. He contributed a famous solo to Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" just a few months before he died.

Cedrone was a friend of Haley's who played with him for recording sessions but was never a member of his group. Danny had his own combo, the Esquire Boys, who are the focus of today's post - although Haley and Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith make appearances as well.

The genesis of this article was my recent post of recordings by Ralph Marterie's band, among them his version of Juan Tizol's "Caravan."

My friend Dave from Ardmore pointed out that the Marterie record was actually a cover of a single by the Esquire Boys, and suggested I post the original. It leads off this collection.

Sadly for the Esquire Boys, Marterie's Mercury record was more popular - although Cedrone and company did nicely.

The Esquire Boys were not rockers by background. Their output varies between middle-of-the-road fare and up-tempo numbers. The second song in the set is an example of the former - the country-ish ballad "We Drifted Apart" with guest vocalist Kay Karol and a spoken chorus. It demonstrates the group's biggest weakness - they did not sing well.

The early photo of the group below shows them with accordion and steel guitar, suggesting they had roots in country music, similar to their friend Haley, who was calling his group "The Saddlemen" at the time.

The Esquire Boys

Haley had given his friend Cedrone the song "Rock-a-Beatin Boogie," which the boys recorded twice, first for Rainbow in late 1952, then for Guyden the following year, before Haley got around to doing so. Both are in this set.

Meanwhile, Cedrone was making the first recording of the famous solo that would eventually appear on "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954. It first appeared in Haley's "Rock the Joint" (which is usually called "Rock this Joint" - that's what Bill sings). The number came out on Essex in 1952, attributed to Bill Haley with the Saddlemen. When Haley and Cedrone recorded "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954, they figured the "Rock the Joint" solo merited a repeat.

Also in the set from the Esquire Boys are the "St. Louis Blues" on Guyden and the "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" on Nickelodeon. The latter shows one of Cedrone's influences - the guitarist Arthur Smith, who first recorded "Guitar Boogie" for Super Disc in 1945 as "the Rambler Trio featuring Arthur Smith." It was re-released on M-G-M in 1948 as by "Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith and His Cracker-Jacks." This later pressing is heard in this set.

Finally, we have the Esquire Boys with their circa 1953 version of "Taboo," the Marguerita Lecuona tune dating from the 1930s. I don't believe the song had yet become an exotica classic. That would come in a few years with versions by Les Baxter and especially Arthur Lyman with its bird calls and sound effects. None of that here - but just as Arthur Smith was an influence on Cedrone, Danny's playing likely had an influence on Dick Dale and other guitarists to come.

LINK

Music from 'Foreign Intrigue'

Foreign Intrigue was a 1956 film by the American writer-director Sheldon Reynolds, who primarily worked in television - including a series of the same name as the film just mentioned. 

The film was a made-in-Europe spy drama with Robert Mitchum providing the American star power.

Foreign Intrigue did not merit a soundtrack LP; like some other movies it was relegated to the 45 rpm bin, where both a single and EP could be found. Today we'll listen to the single, which has two pieces by different composers that are interesting in their own ways.

First is the "Foreign Intrigue Concerto," a quasi-Rachmaninoff composition, one of a long series of such pieces written for film soundtracks. The vogue for such works had been touched off by the "Warsaw Concerto," Richard Addinsell's enduring piece from the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight. That was a war film; Foreign Intrigue was a postwar film involving Nazis, so perhaps it all makes sense.

Charles Norman and Paul Durand

The Foreign Intrigue Concerto was the handiwork of Charles Norman, a Swedish composer who mainly worked in Europe. The transfer of the concerto from soundtrack to vinyl was none too good, so I dubbed the piece directly from the film for this post, with the exception of a brassy coda from the record that I don't recall hearing in the film. The pianist is uncredited.

The second piece - imaginatively named "Intrigue" - is by the film's music director, the French composer Paul Durand. This is a repeating motif on the soundtrack. Here we have one of the treatments. The music is built on a memorable bass ostinato, which was almost inaudible on the 45 before I boosted the gain so you can hear it.

Surprisingly, "Intrigue" was turned into a vocal pop song, here represented by the Cadence single from the wonderful Barry Sisters. The lyrics were added by Ervin Drake, but it's the Barrys and Archie Bleyer's fine production that make it work.

The Barry Sisters - Merna and Claire

The opening bass line on their version may have you thinking - or rather it had me thinking - of "Hernando's Hideaway" from the 1955 musical The Pajama Game. That thought must have occurred to Drake, for he produced a sotto-voce opening to his lyrics - "What are you afraid you'll be revealing?" the Sisters whisper, and so on.

By the way, the film is a enjoyable watch, although the plot is full of holes. Bob Mitchum is always welcome and the cast also includes the exceptionally attractive and accomplished Geneviève Page and Ingrid Thulin.

LINK

Foreign Intrigue: Mitchum's in trouble!